Results for “age of em”

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Having experienced the strengths and weaknesses of the NHS firsthand — I recently completed treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma — Tyler kindly awarded me an Emergent Ventures grant to travel to Singapore to study their healthcare system. I would like to meet with health professionals and civil servants working in the health sector. I am looking for practical lessons that can be applied to the NHS i.e not user charges. I am particularly interested in industrial relations, the management of publicly-owned hospitals, and the cost-effectiveness of polyclinics. If you have insights to share or would like to connect, please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]

My perception is that in Germany most major political decisions are not on the ballot: migration, nuclear energy, international, alliances, emission reduction policies to name but a few examples. Whereas people in the Americas worry about polarization, I would argue that Germany’s problem is the opposite. Compared to the historical average German politics is too tame and not polarized enough. Polarized debates were much more endemic when the country debated the Nato Doppelbeschluss, the Kohl era (re-unification) or the Adenauer era (West alliance, later the failed project of a European army). The counterfactual in many of these cases would have been different had the other party been in power. The same is not true for the Merkel era. The word ‘Alternative’ derives from her suggesting that her Euro-crisis management was without alternative. If I may offer one conjecture as to why this is happening, I would argue that the degree of elite convergence is greater than in the Americas. The opinion spectrum covered by public intellectuals is just so much smaller. And with trade unions and the church in decline so is the opinion spectrum covered by the country’s leading non-governmental institutions. (The treatment of that party’s very different initial leadership in the mid 2010’s illustrates this point.) So, in short, my (and many people’s) argument is that as in the Hotelling model ideological conformity of the elites has created the space for a non-ideologically aligned entrant. Naturally, this entrant is more extreme than a more conservative version of the Christian Democrats (and I tend to think that this is so because Christianity forbids you to go down certain tempting, yet inhumane rabbit holes but that is for another day) and of lesser quality because given the current intellectual climate the new party has trouble recruiting elites. Needless to say, you should not vote for this party. But I understand why it exists.

That is from “C.”

1. Is the south America’s hidden urban laboratory?

2. Beauty and on-line teaching in Sweden.

3. Peter Coy on the case against free parking (NYT).

4. Harvard body parts markets in everything.

5. Did Woke cause cultural decadence?  (Not exactly my view, are areas such as instrumental or “minimal vocal” music seeing a different trend?)

1. The gender gap in commercializing science.

2. YIMBY for Anchorage?

3. Jon Hartley is launching a de-dollarization facts website.

4. AI experimental church service in Germany, at least the first one drew a crowd.

5. Kenyan Luddites.

6. Claims about minimum wage and homelessness.  I’ll say it again: the results on this question are swinging back in the neoclassical direction.

1. Further reason to discount Grusch.  And commentary from Ross.  Nonetheless here is a look at the more serious evidence.

2. How culture normalizes patriarchy.

3. The UK plans to lead on AI.  Says Sunak.  And a few of you have been asking for more Macca content, so here is Macca on AI, not the worst comments I have heard on the topic.  Macca is still at the frontier, even at age 80 or so.

4. What do we know about corporate discount rates?

5. “The percentage of profits appropriated by the [Sicilian] Mafia ranges from 40% for small firms to 2% for large enterprises.”

6. Dugin update.

Kyle Harper’s Plagues Upon the Earth is a remarkable accomplishment that weaves together microbiology, history, and economics to understand the role of diseases in shaping human history. Harper, an established historian known for his first three books on Rome and late antiquity, has an impressive command of virology, bacteriology, and parasitology as well as history and economics. In “Plagues Upon the Earth.” he explains all of these clearly and with many arresting turns of phrase and insights:

There are about seventy-three bacteria among major human pathogens–out of maybe a trillion bacterial species on earth. To imagine bacteria primarily as pathogens is about as fair as thinking of human beings as mostly serial killers.

Despite the tingling fear we still feel in the face of large animals, fire made predators a negligible factor in human population dynamics. The warmth, security and mystic peace you feel around the campfire has been instilled by almost two million years of evolutionary advantage given to us by the flames.

Mosquitos are vampires with wings….The blood heist itself is an amazing feat. Following contrails of carbon dioxide that lead to her mark, the female mosquito lands and starts probing. Once she reaches her target, she inserts her tube-like needle, as flexible as a plumber’s snake, into the skin. She pokes a dozen or more times until she hits her mark. The proboscis itself is moistened with compounds that anesthetize the victim’s skin and deter coagulation. For a tense minute or two, she pulls blood into her gut, taking on several times her own weight, as much as she can carry and still fly. She has stolen a valuable liquid full of energy and free metals. Engorged, she unsteadily makes her getaway, desperate for the nearest vertical plane to land and recuperate, as her body digests the meal and keeps only what is needful for her precious eggs.

What I like best about Plagues Upon the Earth is that Harper thinks like an economist. I mean this in two senses. First, his chapters on the Wealth and Health of Nations and Disease and Global Divergence are alone worth the price of admission. In these chapters, Harper brings disease to the fore to understand why some nations are rich and others poor but he is well aware of all the other explanations and weaves the story together with expertise.

The second sense in which Harper thinks like an economist is deeper and more important. He has a model of parasites and their interactions with human beings. That model, of course, is the evolutionary model. To a parasite, human beings are a desirable host:

Just as robbers steal from banks because that is where the money is, parasites exploit human bodies because there are high rewards for being able to do so…. for a parasite, there is now more incentive to exploit humans than ever…look at human energy consumption…in a developed society today, every individual consumer is the rough ecological equivalent to a herd of gazelles.

That parasites are driven by “incentives” would seem to be nearly self-evident but in the hands of a master simple models can lead to surprising hypothesis and conclusions. Harper is the Gary Becker of parasite modeling. Here’s a simple example: human beings have changed their environments tremendously in the past several hundred years but that change in human environment created new incentives and constraints on parasites. Thus, it’s not surprising that most human parasites are new parasites. Chimpanzee parasites today are about the same as those that exploited chimpanzees 100,000 years ago but human parasites are entirely different. Indeed, because the human-host environment has changed, our parasites are more novel, narrow, and nasty than parasites attacking other species.

It’s commonly suggested that one of the reasons we are encountering novel parasites is due to our disruptions of natural ecosystems, venturing into territories previously unexplored by humans, thereby releasing ancient parasites that have lain dormant for millennia. Like the alleged curse of Tutankhamun’s tomb we are unleashing ancient foes! Similarly, concerns are voiced that climate change, through its effect on permafrost melt, may liberate “zombie” parasites poised for retaliation. But ancient parasites are not fit for human hosts as they have not evolved within the context of the contemporary human environment. So, while I don’t trivialize the potential consequences of melting permafrost, I think we should fear much more relatively recent diseases such as measles, cholera, polio, Ebola, AIDS, Zika, and COVID-19. Not to mention whatever entirely new disease evolution is bound to throw in our path.

Indeed, one of the most interesting speculation’s in Plagues Upon the Earth is that “global divergences in health may have reached their maxima in the early twentieth century.” The reason is that urbanization and transportation turned the new diseases of the industrial era, like cholera, tuberculosis and the plague (the latter older diseases but ideally primed for the industrial era) into pandemics (also a relatively recent word) at a time when only a minority of the world had the tools to combat the new diseases.

Science, of course, is giving us greater understanding and control of nature but our very success increases the incentives of parasites to breach our defenses.

[Thus,] the narrative is not one of unbroken progress, but one of countervailing pressures between the negative health feedback of growth and humanity’s rapidly expanding but highly unequal capacities to control threats to our health.

1. Brian Chau on how economists see AI.

2. Misha Saul reviews Louise Perry on sex and agency.

3. MIE: “Enter Gensyn, a blockchain-based marketplace protocol connecting developers (anyone who is able to train a machine learning model) with solvers (anyone who wants to train a machine learning model). By tapping into the long tail of idle, machine-learning-capable compute around the world — such as in smaller data centers, personal gaming computers, M1 and M2 Macs, and eventually even smartphones — Gensyn can potentially 10-100x the available compute power for machine learning.”  Link here.

4. Fortune 500 CEO colleges, as of 2019.

5. “Chickens in gardens, naturally”?

6. MIE: “Frosted lemon Cheerios.”